


Close the door (but don't forget)

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Wayward Children Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Gen, Tw for (vague) mentions of transphobia in the last few paragraphs, friendship and bonding, minor spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway and Beneath the Sugar Sky, tw for mention of character death (offscreen) and grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 02:12:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17910020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: "Eleanor!" Looking horribly embarrassed, the woman turned to the bemused Pevensies. "I'm sorry, my daughter has a somewhat...overactive imagination. She's asking about your favourite game of pretend."Susan was already watching, with a touch of disbelief, for the hidden flinch so caught the secretive smile, and felt her heart quicken. Her parents were already laughing, and talking about the games she and her siblings were forever playing after the war. Her pulse was a roaring in her ears, because she knew the look in Eleanor West's eyes as well as the other girl could see into hers, because her own well meaning mother was saying "...some fantastical thing with talking animals and unicorns, where was it set darling?""Narnia," she murmured, voice perfectly light, inconsequential, "we called it Narnia." Her parents nodded, unconcerned, and they were all chuckling over the vivid imaginations of children and her pulse was screaming in her ears, and then the girl before her was looping and arm through hers and tugging her towards the door, asking permission to be excused so she could show Susan the grounds for a bit and leave the adults to it.(Susan Pevensie meets Eleanor West in America, during Dawn Treader)





	Close the door (but don't forget)

**Author's Note:**

> I read Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway this morning and immediately had a deep need for Narnia cross-over fic, and figured I’d try writing something of my own before going in search of it!

When Susan Pevensie was in her teens (for the second time), her parents took her with them on a trip to America.

Her older brother was spending the break with the kindly old professor they had met and befriended as evacuees, where he was being coached through his revision and spending long evenings trading stories of the fantastical worlds they had travelled to as children. Her younger siblings had been condemned to a holiday with their prim and proper aunt and uncle, their horror of a cousin, where they were bored out of their minds until they were swept up in an adventure that took them back home, for a while at least.

Susan went to America, where she could be a polite society lady, because she was pretty and polite and already so grown up for her age, because she wasn't bright enough to merit the time of a professor to help her with her studies.

Once, Susan had been a queen - she had been the diplomat to her brother's general, the High King and High Queen of Narnia reading the same documents and navigating the same political minefields. She had been smart enough, there, but then she'd had tutors who didn't care that she was a girl, who taught her things she wanted to know not things she didn't care about, who taught her things that were about the mantle of responsibility settled over her shoulders.

She did well enough at school, back in England, but she was no academic and she found it hard to care about most of it. Her parents weren't too worried, because she had impeccable manners and the lightest touch with social engagements, a knack for soothing ruffled feathers, a way of speaking and smiling as though every person in the room was the single most important there. She had been taught that all, once upon a time, and she seethed when the boys at her brothers' school muttered about shallow girls. She hadn't seethed when Peter said something similar in one of their frequent arguments, just looked at him long and cold before asking mildly if he had a spare horse for her to ride, if he could take her to an archery range on a whim, or if he had managed to turn the Christmas row brewing at the table awry so that their mother didn't burst into tears over some hateful comment while she hid in the kitchen so as not to make a scene.

It was a while away yet, but her parents weren’t too worried about her future. They planned for her to find a nice husband with a stable income, but Susan wasn't sure she would be able to stand to be a wife not a consort, after a now lost adulthood spent weighing the needs of her country alongside her own.

She stepped out at the informal get togethers and scheduled parties with a perfect smile, nibbled daintily at the buffets and sat so that her skirts didn't wrinkle. She made friendly conversation and tried to ignore the bit of her mind that was noting it all down in Narnian shorthand, ready to pass to her spymaster younger brother to follow up on. She pretended, firmly, that she was just memorising things to write to her siblings about, to giggle over with them when she got home.

They stayed for a while with a friend of her father's, from the war, and she was halfway through another polite, meaningless enquiry when the girl before her in the horrifically clashing skirt and blouse cheerfully interrupted her to demand to know where she’d gone, what her real home was like.

Susan was deciphering this odd statement when their host sighed, and hissed an admonishment. 

"Eleanor!" Looking horribly embarrassed, the woman turned to the bemused Pevensies. "I'm sorry, my daughter has a somewhat...overactive imagination. She's asking about your favourite game of pretend."

Susan was already watching, with a touch of disbelief, for the hidden flinch so caught the secretive smile, and felt her heart quicken. Her parents were already laughing, and talking about the games she and her siblings were forever playing after the war. Her pulse was a roaring in her ears, because she knew the look in Eleanor West's eyes as well as the other girl could see into hers, because her own well meaning mother was saying "...some fantastical thing with talking animals and unicorns, where was it set darling?"

"Narnia," she murmured, voice perfectly light, inconsequential, "we called it Narnia." Her parents nodded, unconcerned, and they were all chuckling over the vivid imaginations of children and her pulse was screaming in her ears, and then the girl before her was looping and arm through hers and tugging her towards the door, asking permission to be excused so she could show Susan the grounds for a bit and leave the adults to it.

By unspoken agreement, as soon as they were safely out of sight they ran, feet pounding the grass and breath heaving. Susan was wearing a pretty dress, but like all her clothes it was cut to allow free movement, her shoes pretty and polished but flat and buckled, practical. 

(Many people had or would call Susan practical over her lifetime, and they were right - practicality was what she had had, a child stranded in a war, three siblings and a kingdom to protect, fur coats taken from a wardrobe that opened into a frozen world)

They ducked into a shadowed copse of trees, and Susan wasn't surprised to find a well worn patchwork picnic blanket tucked into a hollow. Eleanor unfolded it with a flourish and flopped down.

"Sorry," she said brightly, "but it looked like that was hurting you so I thought we should leave." Susan lowered herself to the blanket as well, trying to find her equilibrium again.

"Where - " her voice was a dry rasp, and she swallowed down the rest of the question, but the other girl beamed. 

"Oh, there's a door to a nonsense land in the grounds. I'd take you through but - I don't think you could." Susan closed her eyes, hope she hadn't meant to let herself feel dying before it had really begun. Of course she couldn't slip through a door again - she'd been told that the way home was closed to her, she knew, so why should any others be open? A hand found hers, squeezing gently. 

"Hey," said Ely, "hey, no, I don't mean - the doors only let certain people through, when it's the right way for them. To go to mine you have to, you have to be full of nonsense too, and I don't think that it's the same for yours? I don’t think that’s you, unless you’re really good at hiding it. But...I could show you my paintings, if you like?"

Susan took a shaky breath. She knew the fragility of that kind of memory, what it took to offer it up in good faith. She smiled. 

"I'd like that. I'm no good with a pencil or brush, but I remember a few Narnian poems and stories."

(Most days, she told herself she didn't - that these snippets were from half-forgotten old books, ones she'd found in the library at school or in the house they'd been sent to in the evacuation, but the look in Ely's eyes was like that in her reflection, in her siblings’ gazes, and that made it okay to offer up the memories in all their soap bubble fragility)

They became friends, to their parents’ collective slight confusion and genuine delight. Susan would write to Ely every other month for the rest of her life, a clockwork correspondence that didn't falter even as Susan started trying to forget. Ely was getting older, was learning that every time she slipped back through her portal it would be harder, clinging to the memories every time all the same.

She wrote Susan the day she returned to her parents house for the last time, tears staining the page and the whole envelope stuffed with remembered paintings and sketches. Susan had stopped writing about Narnia, about adventures and other worlds, months before, but she wrote back with calm assurances and warm, heartfelt sympathy, and nothing about stories and whimsy and how bright Ely's imagination was.

This was what Susan's siblings didn't have the time to learn to understand; forgetting Narnia wasn't the passage of time, some intrinsic drift from the surety they had once shared. It was a choice. It was a decision. It was a banished girl saying: fine, this is the world in which I must stay, so it is where I will live. Peter could still believe he would make it back, Edmund could cling to the promise of one day, they both could live with that hope and not suffocate under it because they were allowed to be leaders and soldiers or scholars or athletes, could shout and expect to be heard here. Lucy could do it because Lucy burned with it, because she walked in whimsy and made it an armour, a challenge, and Susan didn't know how to that for herself.

Susan had a desk job and a knack for writing personalised thank you notes. She had the memory of bowstrings and strands of a lion's mane tangled in her fingers, and she buried it away because she couldn't live on dreams. She had been told to walk away. She had been told that she wasn’t going to be allowed the choice of whether or not to stay.

The last time she spoke to her sister, one evening over the phone, Lucy mentioned something to do with Narnia. She asked if Su had felt the call, the need, the danger to their home - and Susan would never be quite sure if she had lied when she said no. She had felt the call ever since Caspian blew her horn to call them back, because it had never gone away. It had settled in her bones and marrow, a desperate scream for a place she could never reach. She had laughed about the games they had played and recited a bit of remembered poetry, about the sunlight on the waves at Cair Paravell, that had been one of Lucy's favourites.

She would recite it at the funeral, not long after. She would write them all out, every recollected scrap, and sent them to Ely for safekeeping, because she couldn't stand to remember but she couldn't stand to let it all go either.

She moved to America not long after, because England without her siblings felt hollow, and because Ely's parents had passed away too and there was comfort in sympathetic company. Ely had plans for her house and grounds, and Susan helped - well. Ely had dreams, more like, and Susan pinned them down into plans, paperwork, into a framework that could actually work. She taught reading and comprehension, officially, and unofficially mentored on manners and the art of being a hostess. One of their earliest wayward children had fingers that itched for a remembered bowstring, and when Susan picked up a bow for the first time since she'd stepped through a doorway back to a train platform she felt something in her heart break and settle.

They helped lost children, but Susan was watching more for the ones who were looking for a way to re-mould themselves and Ely was looking for the ones with hope, the ones who would die rather than forget. There were frequent conflicts, until Susan marched into their shared office one day after breaking up a particularly vicious fight to lay out a new plan.

They had savings, and more to the point Ely had inherited a second house, far enough away not to overlap but close enough. Susan would move there, and take the ones who needed to forget, to move on, or at least learn to pretend they had. Ely would keep the ones who needed to remember, even if they also had to learn to pretend they hadn't.

(Regularly, Susan would get students who demanded to know how exactly she thought she could help them when she was stuck running a school for the wayward. Sometimes she went cold and regal, othertimes she went soft with smiles, depending what they needed from her. She always told them the truth; because she knew what it was to want to forget but be unable to, and now that she could no longer stand to forget she could at least help others move on)

They wrote each other every other month, like clockwork. They couldn't meet often, with children in their care, but whenever they did they compared the signs of age. Ely was ageing slowly. Susan aged at a normal pace, but elegantly, soft graduations. She was thinking about possible replacements before Ely had even thought about acquiring spectacles.

When Susan eventually passed away, Ely would read Narnian poetry at her funeral, would tell a congregation who had for the most part never known them stories about the other Pevensie children, because this had been what scared Susan most - not that she would forget Narnia, but that she would forget her siblings, that she would remember only the parts of themselves they showed the rest of the world and not the parts that had mattered most.

Some time later, her own nephew would disappear and return in the space of a thunderclap, unchanged except for the ways he knew himself better, now, and would be sent to her by horrified parents with whom Ely would have many long, frustrating rows. Kade was still settling into his skin, stinging and smarting from being thrown out of Prism, from being sent away by his parents who couldn't see him as clearly as a goblin had as it died at the other end of his sword.

He was burying himself in books and stories, the records she’d made of all the world’s she’d heard of, so she gathered up a sheaf of papers covered in an elegant hand, stories of a world through the back of a wardrobe and songs to which Ely didn't know the tune. She knocked on his door and set her offering down next to him, safely away from the steaming cocoa by his other elbow, a fragile gift from one hand to another.

Years later, he would tell her that the Lord of the Dead said that even those who never found a door home found their way once they were nothing but spirit. He didn’t need to ask why her paintings that evening were of golden lions and sunlight on waves at the foot of a castle neither of them had ever seen.


End file.
